Tag Archives: old

Software Asset Management Obstacle 1 – decommissioning Machines

Coming from a system management background, it never ceases to amaze me how many old unused assets are still lurking in active directory cluttering up that efficient looking directory service.

So what do you do to manage all these stale resources, Yes there are a myriad of scripts to pull the last log on date from a computer account one of which you can see here:-

# This PowerShell Command will query Active Directory and return the computer accounts which have not logged for the past
# 60 days. You can easily change the number of days from 60 to any number of your choosing.
$then = (Get-Date).AddDays(-60) # The 60 is the number of days from today since the last logon.
Get-ADComputer -Property Name,lastLogonDate -Filter {lastLogonDate -lt $then} | FT Name,lastLogonDate
# If you would like to Disable these computer accounts, uncomment the following line:
# Get-ADComputer -Property Name,lastLogonDate -Filter {lastLogonDate -lt $then} | Set-ADComputer -Enabled $false
# If you would like to move these computer accounts, uncomment the following line:
# Get-ADComputer -Property Name,lastLogonDate -Filter {lastLogonDate -lt $then} | Move-ADObject -TargetPath "OU=OLD-Computers,DC=Contoso,DC=Com"

Great we are making progress now we have the power to automate the task of cleaning up active directory of old stale computer accounts and have the ability to remove old accounts and then all them fancy reports from SCCM and other sources are pretty current and no longer are your staff looking for old assets.

This to me was great process, until I sat down and realized that this isn’t true lifecycle management and really has no place in the enterprise.

For example your company is spending huge amounts of money on software licensing, does your IT manager want to be paying for software licenses which are currently broken or even worse stolen.

So the fact that you have tidied active directory of stale computer accounts, this is a tiny and some would say insignificant house keeping exercise unless you manage the complete life cycle of the device from provisioning to decommision.

The average cost of a Corporate PC’s software licenses is around £1200, and if you don’t account for this in your housekeeping exercise then you might as well throw that money away.

Why do you think software discovery is big business and fetching huge revenues to software companies along with the need to manage the audits every month to remain compliant if there is such a word using these tool sets?

Well let me tell you about Slickey License Manager we have just introduced a new feature called “Decommission” which will place the licenses from these machines back in to the pool for redeployment.

So not only do we issue allocated licenses at the time of install with any Software Delivery Tool, we can also remove any license inventory on old computers and even employees who have left the company.